On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 at 18:01, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:
On 9/20/2019 11:50 AM, Lieven L. Litaer wrote:(By the way, it's very likely that Star Trek authors picked {qIv} "knee"
and made it longer by one syllable.)
Then why didn't they just say knee? I think the Star Trek writers were playing the same game that Okrand does: inventing a Klingon organ and not telling us what it is.
It's explicitly stated in The Star Trek Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., p. 393, that this was the word for knee. Out-of-universe, the writers or director probably didn't like the way {qIv} sounded and added an extra syllable. In-universe, perhaps this is a dialectical word in Kor's dialect (he doesn't seem to quite speak what we know as standard Klingon), or perhaps there is some technical difference between {qIv} and *{qIvon}.
The encyclopedia explanation was doubtless invented after the fact to explain the word. I don't believe for a moment that the episode writer was thinking that.
If it's his knee, he'd have said knee. The universal translator may leave some Klingon words untranslated, but it can translate knee.
Martok didn't say "I do not want an artificial min!" He didn't say "I accept your lives into my ghopDu'." Worf didn't say "I was standing in the jungle with my tIq pounding in my logh'ob." It simply makes no sense for the writers to put a Klingon word for knee in Kor's mouth.
On the other hand, it makes all kinds of sense for the writers to
take a humorous line and add an unexplained Klingon organ to it,
and leave it to our imaginations to decide what it is.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name